Each year people die in accidents at level crossings involving road vehicles colliding with trains. 95% of these fatalities are attributed to faults by the road vehicle driver who doesn’t pay attention to signalling. Despite this, society labels most fatal accidents at level crossings as a rail problem.
In spite of the best safety precautions, level crossings remain a weak point. Operations are fully automatic. In the event of a malfunction, the fail-safe principle applies. The safety system takes over and prevents a level crossing from opening by mistake. Nevertheless, most incidents still occur at level crossings. Car driver carelessness or recklessness are usually to be blamed. That is why, it is recommended to replace level crossings with tunnels or bridges where possible. In 2009, UIC and the European railway community, together with road organisations, the European Commission and UNECE initiated the campaign “International Level Crossings Awareness Day” – ILCAD for raising the awareness of people using the roads and pedestrians about the risks they face at level crossings and in order to change their behaviour. From 2010, ILCAD has had its own web site and in 2011 over 400 countries involved in this campaign and the international media has written about this in more than 500 articles. This year the campaign will take place on June 7, in over 41 countries worldwide. Therefore, a significant risk for the safe operation of the railway network is in fact just a small element of the general problem on road safety. What can we do to re-establish the balance?
In many countries, level crossings on less important roads and railway lines are often “open” or “uncontrolled”, sometimes with warning lights or bells to warn of approaching trains. Another critical point is the lack of projects in which rail and road operators are jointly involved.
To reduce the impacts due to accident operational consequences at level crossing and to increase safety and human awareness is important to introduce new technologies in the level crossings operational management, but high safety requirements together with high railway standards are presently hindering technological upgrade of level crossings.
In order to calculate the risks of failure and hence the change in failure risk when new technology is introduced, it is necessary to carry out a comprehensive physical decomposition of the system in question.
Moreover is not possible to quantify the relationship between the cost of new technologies and the risk reduction that their introduction involves. This is mainly due to unavailability of a statistical base and the missing of data standardisation as well as inputs for the required evaluations.
A significant part of the technology oriented rail side projects is dedicated to the investigation of low cost solutions applicable especially to level crossings with low traffic conditions (road and rail). The aim of these projects is to reduce the contemporary relatively high number of accidents occurring on passive level crossings equipped only with St. Andrew‘s cross. Such technological developments are in their testing and evaluation phase in Austria (ISIS), Switzerland (Micro) and France (SAL0).
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